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Paper short abstract

This paper approaches drought as a hydrosocial process, arguing that low-water conditions are co-produced through infrastructures, water uses, and political arrangements rather than just climatic extremes, drawing on research in Grenoble, a city in the Alps long associated with water abundance.

Paper long abstract

This paper approaches drought as a hydrosocial process, arguing that low-water conditions are co-produced through infrastructures, water uses, and political arrangements rather than arising solely from climatic extremes. It draws on historical and ethnographic research in the hinterlands of Grenoble, a city in the French Alps long associated with water abundance.

The region has been deeply marked by hydraulic ingenuity and experimentation from at least the Middle Ages, that led to the development of hydroelectricity in the 19th century and the second industrial revolution it powered. Since the late nineteenth century, Grenoble’s drinking water supply has relied on wells tapping the alluvial aquifers of the Drac valley. From the outset, this public service coexisted with—and was progressively constrained by—industrial water uses linked to paper mills, chemical plants and hydroelectric development. Over time, the River Drac, its water table and its tributaries have been so heavily developed that they have been managed as simple “reserved flows”, negotiated with EDF, the French operator responsible of the dams, canals and hydroelectric plants . Attending to situated practices, discourses, and materialities through which low water is sensed and governed, the paper shows how drought emerges as a socio-material process shaped by infrastructures, imaginaries of abundance, and unequal water uses.